Extracting time‐domain Green's function estimates from ambient seismic noise

Abstract

It has been demonstrated experimentally and theoretically that an estimate of the Green's function between two seismic stations can be obtained from the time‐derivative of the long‐time average cross correlation of ambient noise between these two stations. This TDGF estimate from just the noise field includes all tensor components of the Green's function and these Green's function estimates can be used to infer Earth structure. We have computed cross correlations using 1 to 30 continuous days of ambient noise recorded by over 150 broadband seismic stations located in Southern California. The data processing yielded thousands of cross‐correlation pairs, for receiver separations from 4–500 km, which clearly exhibit coherent broadband propagating dispersive wavetrains across frequency band 0.1–2 Hz.